Dread Ends

On the flight home from Paris, I watched this beautiful French movie (I watched three actually, and I’m totally counting The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past as one) and I’ve already forgotten the name of it, but it involved 6 people and their lives that are changed because of one fateful trip to the airport. One such person was a mother with grown children who decides to commit suicide rather than undergo chemo therapy again. At the airport she meets a famous author, bitter and hardened by writer’s block, and they spend just an hour together before she departs. Their stilted, though generally upbeat, romance doesn’t change a thing in the end, and this point in particular, filled me with dread. And I thought dread feels a lot like anticipation – my heart swells like a vacuum bag about to blow its load all over the living room. I felt it also when the foul man in Sofia tried to touch Ellie’s face. I felt it too in Paris when we were wandering the streets in the rain and a man walked towards us with his penis dangling out from the top of his jeans. It flapped comically as he walked and only I saw it and then Ellie said something about the hotel we were looking for and the dread stopped and it was just us again, lost in the rain in Paris. I fear this fear, this anticipation that seems to tumble out of me like wine just opened–glugglugglug–like my heart isn’t pumping, but jumping. I know there are a lot of uncertains ahead and I fear also that I am fixating on the stupid little irritations, like I am reading a novel of my life, but only the punctuation. Thinking about how AT&T overcharged me again, how I’m broke but not, how I’m home in a city I can’t claim as my own, how I’m filled with a nostalgia that seems more imagined than real and the injustices pile up and up, all of them all over the world, to people who’ve suffered more than I can even invent, but lately my response has been to shrug, to throw up my hands and say nothing, because confrontation brings about the dread. Too.

But I don’t want to whine. The world is too beautiful and seeing it is bigger than my fears of it. For now, at least.